User:Bg/thoughts
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Thoughts on some areas for IFWiki updates
2016 survey results
Based on the survey results from 2016, the following types of pages are high priority:
- Adding new competition pages: 68% of voters/25 votes
- Updating existing pages about craft and theory (examples: ifwiki.org/index.php/Theory) 58% of voters/21 votes
- Updating existing pages about authoring systems and interpreters: 47% of voters/17 votes
- Adding new pages about authoring systems and interpreters: 44% of voters/16 votes
So, I'm wondering, is there anything we can do about these types of pages to improve them or make them easier to update? Especially now that we might be able to add extensions to ifwiki? (Also listed are some other unrelated areas for improvement)
Craft and Theory
I find the Craft and Theory pages a little unintuitive.
- I wonder if the links at the top of the page that point to the different headings could be in a traditional wiki nav box instead, on the left side. As is, it's not immediately obvious to me that they link to headings on the same page.
- Also don't know if there's a better way to organize these theory topics (on separate pages, for example?). I can see the benefit of having all theory links on the same page, because there's some overlap between categories, and it makes it easier to avoid duplication, but I'm wondering if this could be improved somehow to make it easier to follow.
- Maybe we could at least come up with a system for organizing the links in each category (by date? by author?) and add dates to everything (and figure out a standard format of date to follow).
Interpreters
The interpreter page would benefit from an overhaul, as discussed elsewhere.
Authoring Systems
I wonder if there's anything we can do to improve authoring system pages.
- Some of these have an info box, which I think is a relatively new addition to ifwiki (for authoring tools, anyway) so many pages don't have them. Do we like the info box? Do we want to tweak it?
- Do we want to make it easier to edit the info box, via a form?
- Do we also want a sorted, auto-updated-when-you-update-the-authoring-system-page list of authoring systems somewhere, so people can sort them by most recent release date, similar to what's been discussed for interpreters? Or we could have a list of authoring systems that are currently maintained? On the other hand, we could leave that to IFDB, as I think they have a suggestion about that.
- Maybe we could add a note to authoring system pages (or to the stubs?) clarifying that maintainers/creators are welcome to update their own authoring system page (and so are other people, but the point is that creators don't have to be shy just because it might seem like self-promotion.... but maybe they already know this?)
Competitions
- Do we want a form for competition pages?
- Do we want to grab that info from IFDB, or at least some of it? Once a comp is complete, the comp info doesn't change much, but it's subject to change (at least the order of entries) up until results are announced. So I don't know if it makes sense to always grab that information live, like we are talking about doing for game pages, but some of it could maybe be automated when the page is created, and again when the results are announced.
- - There could be a form - what would you want it to look like? It would be possible to add the information to the Work page (e.g. x competition entrant, y place) and have that automatically appear on the relevant competition page. Jonathan (talk) 23:44, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
- It would be nice if there were a field where you could paste in the competition id number from IFDB, and IFWiki would use that to automatically gather most of the information from IFDB: dates, organizer name, entries, authors, and authoring systems. (Authoring systems are not listed on IFDB's competition page, but maybe it would make sense to add that feature on IFDB? Or if not, ifwiki could pull that information from the individual IFDB game pages.) And maybe there could be a "refresh" button that you can click to automatically update the information from IFDB after results are announced. I would rather not have to edit each game page individually--or even add game pages to ifwiki at all--in order to get the entries to show up correctly on the competition page. It should also be possible to add free-text information, and it would be good to be able to edit the IFDB information once it's been imported (in case a tie shows up weirdly, or a note needs to be added about an entry that was disqualified, etc). bg (talk) 19:19, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
People
- Survey results were divided on how to deal with games/works on people pages, as far as whether to include all games written by an author, or none (substituting a link to IFDB instead), or somewhere in between. So I'm not sure what to do there.
- But maybe one way we could improve People pages is to make a form for it, to give editors some guidance and maybe reduce the amount of wiki markup they have to do.
- Do we want to think about whether we like the current style guide for people pages, or whether we want to tweak anything?
- - I agree in principle with adding an optional form for this. It would be possible automatically to list all games by an author on the author's page, with links back to the relevant wiki page. It would miss out games not on the wiki, of course. I've not looked at the style guides in detail yet... Jonathan (talk) 23:41, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
- I'd be interested in experimenting with forms if you end up installing the extension on a dev site.
- It'd be nice to be able to enter someone's id from IFDB, and then the IFWiki page would automatically provide a link to the person's IFDB reviews (if there are any) in the "Articles and Reviews" heading, a link to the person's games on IFDB (if there are any) under the "Works" heading, and a link to the person's IFDB profile page under the "Links" heading. Headings (like works, porting credits, etc.) could show up on the page only if info was entered into them. Maybe even relevant page categories could be added based on the information entered. I'm not sure what I think about automatically listing all games that are on ifwiki. I guess we should decide what direction to go with listing games on people pages....and having game pages on ifwiki in general. Maybe there should definitely be an IFDB link to the person's game, and any specific games ones are optional? bg (talk) 19:52, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
New links, old links, archive links
- I have a leftover list of dead links from when I was using a link checker tool years ago. Do we want to come up with a plan to deal with dead links on a regular basis?
- Do we want to revisit the template that allows you to store an archive link at the same time you are adding a link?
- Is it helpful to enable adding links using some sort of form, especially if there are templates involved?
- - There is an extension that periodically (via a cron job) creates a special page which lists all dead links and what page they are on. That could be used as a "to do" list. Is the template you mentioned Template:Dead link? Jonathan (talk) 23:51, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
- The link checker tool I was using before automatically looks for a snapshot at the internet archive, as well. Does the extension you're talking about do that? Here is the old list: User:Bg/DeadLinksList
- Re: the template--Template:Dead link is one of a few similar templates, but I was thinking of Template:link. We have lost some links on ifwiki permanently because there no snapshot was taken. I thought doing a template like this would help both to prevent that from happening, and to make it easier to automate fixing things later, if we found a dead link. The problem is, adding the archive url makes the link pretty long in the source. Also, my templates don't seem to have caught on....hardly anyone uses them. And I have also since learned that archive snapshots don't always stay available. If someone else buys the domain and blocks robots, internet archive won't show it. So I don't know what the best way to go is. I still think it might be useful in some cases, but not sure how to go about it. bg (talk) 19:38, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
- I think the tool was called pywikibot. Probably this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot
- About robots.txt, I just did a search and it seems like maybe this has changed since the last time I looked into it: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/internet-archive-robots-txt/ bg (talk) 20:14, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
Style of external links, dates
- Can we talk about how to lay out external links? I thought I read somewhere that it's a good idea to use the exact title of the article, where possible, and include the date, so that if the web site you're linking to gets reorganized, or if the article disappears, or something, it's easier to find it again (via search, Wayback machine, etc.). If we do this, it'd be good to figure out how we want to format the date, e.g. January 1, 2022, or 02-Jan-2022, or whatever. As the site (and linked articles) get older, it seems like dates will become more relevant. People will want to know if they are looking at an article from a year ago or 15 years ago.
- - Yes, something like Author, 'Title' (Website, Date) would be good, but I guess it's good to be flexible. I like 1/2/22 but that's problematic as they do it differently in the USA. I think 1 Feb 22 looks neat. Jonathan (talk) 23:39, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
- You can see Sam_Kabo_Ashwell#Review_and_Article_Credits and Versu for an examples of some of the ways external links are sometimes done on ifwiki. I think the general thing that's been done here is to put the title first. The game reference style guide has dashes in the dates. Not sure about going forward, but it might make less work to try to keep things somewhat consistent with how they've been done in the past. bg (talk) 20:08, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
Mobile friendly?
- Is there anything we need to do to make ifwiki more mobile-friendly?
- - The easiest way is to use a responsive skin - we can try some out. Also, avoiding massive HTML tables helps. Jonathan (talk) 23:35, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Front page
- This could use a refresh, I think. We could emphasize areas that are unique to ifwiki games by featuring other articles of general interest instead of games associated with a theme.
- This could probably use other tweaks...not sure what.
- - We can continue this on Talk:Main_Page#Format of main page. Jonathan (talk) 23:34, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Privacy policy
We don't seem to have one.
- - This will be easy to add to IFWiki:Privacy policy. I guess it needs to say that the username will be used to record contributions on history pages etc, and that email addresses are kept private and will only be used for wiki notifications. We could add about the standard cookies that MediaWiki uses, which I are just used for remembering if you are logged in and that sort of thing (not for advertising). Jonathan (talk) 23:32, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
CAPTCHA
- People have complained in the past about the "magic word" question.
- - This will be easy to change. The question is what stopped spam in the past, but I'm fairly sure an easier question would work well too. Jonathan (talk) 23:29, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Spreadsheets
Is there a way, or would it make sense, to store spreadsheets on ifwiki? There are some reviews spreadsheets from recent years of IFComp, that as far as I know, are just living on someone's google account, and a spreadsheet (or spreadsheets?) of the results for the Interactive Fiction Top 50. I donn't know if those are being stored anywhere permanent.